Barney Hegarty

Barney Hegarty is a pen name for Steve Corkhill.
Born in Liverpool, UK, Steve was named by a public vote in the bar of a pub in North Wales. After an enjoyable education where his results reflected his passion and occasional aptitude for team sports, he started his working life training to be an accountant.
His interest in audits soon waned and he changed jobs, only to be made redundant while he was on holiday. So he followed his childhood dream, trained as a schoolmaster and moved into a position in the glorious World Heritage City of Bath, UK. After a fairly rapid rise through the ranks he took his first major career gamble and accepted a 50% pay cut and an 85% reduction in holidays to move into the developing personal computing industry.
It worked. It was quickly evident that there was an enormous gap between the IT specialists and the desires of their customers to be have something both useful and useable. Steve’s particular skills and values were well suited to fill the role of intermediary, specialising in making IT work for businesses across all sorts of sectors. It meant learning every day of his life, which is one of his core principles.
At a birthday party one day, he realised that his commitment to clients meant that he was missing out on his children growing up, so took another career gamble. He resigned and went self-employed.
So FlatBear was born and with it the plan to develop an internet based publishing arm in parallel with his day to day consulting activities. There followed years of study, investigation, wistful dreaming and, frankly, ennui. The consulting was working well and the indie publishing dream slipped out of sight.
He was shocked into action by a series of events in 2013 and 2014 and the result was a series of books under the pen-name of Barney Hegarty, written mainly to test and learn the process of publishing. That established an infrastructure and broke the “one day” barrier.
Receiving his very first payment of literally pennies for making international sales changed the game. He was hooked again.
He finally wrote and published “Reboot For The Worn Out Professional”, a book he had been planning for years in response to seeing colleagues suffering burnout and stress in their high intensity jobs and of course as a result of his own recent challenges.
One day it turned out that he had a heart defect. He went through the experience of open heart surgery, where a barrow-load of beliefs and presumptions were first shattered then realigned. The novel “How To Recover From Open Heart Surgery” is the direct result.
At the time of writing he still lives in Bath. It has been easier to base himself there and travel the world than to continually move around after the work. Apart from that, it’s beautiful.
Steve is still married to Betsan, the woman he first met in 1980.

Read more of this interview.

Website: http://www.ftwop.com
Twitter: @SteveCorkhill
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-corkhill-1750561/
Blog: http://www.ftwop.com

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